


I Don't Want To Be Friends

by timetravellingkiller



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - Teachers, Eventual Romance, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-25
Updated: 2019-08-10
Packaged: 2019-10-16 03:57:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,619
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17542226
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/timetravellingkiller/pseuds/timetravellingkiller
Summary: Leopold Fitz was an engineer for MI5, but when a teammate betrayed him, he was in an accident that left him unable to continue his work. When he regained his ability to speak and use his hands, he trained as a teacher and went to work in a high school in north England. He doesn't want to mix with his colleagues since he is only there to help his recovery until he can be cleared to go back to MI5.But then he meets Jemma Simmons, the biology and chemistry specialist that heads up the science department. She is very possibly the most enthusiastic and optimistic person he has ever met. And she is determined to get him to open up to her and maybe even become his friend.





	1. The First Day

“Thank you for agreeing to join our team, Dr Fitz, we know that you are going to make a brilliant addition to the science department here.” 

Fitz looked up from his shoes, which he had been studying intricately as he listened to the principal of the school - his new boss - go on and on about how important it was for him to become a member of their ‘family’. The idea was almost laughable to him, as the majority of his school memories involved being mercilessly bullied at a place that claimed to be a family. If he was completely honest, if not for his mother, the idea of family seemed completely ridiculous to him.

“Oh, yeah, um sure, thanks for, uh, having me.” He said quickly, noticing that the principal was in the process of standing up to offer his hand out for him to shake, so he shot up from his chair and awkwardly shook his hand, taking that as a dismissal and hurrying out of the room.

Luckily, he had been allocated the classroom at the end of the science corridor, so he wouldn’t have to socialise with any of his coworkers. He was only here to pay the bills and he didn’t need to be making friends while he was trying to focus on his recovery so that he could get out of teaching. He stopped and took a moment to just laugh a little at himself, he hadn’t even been a teacher for five minutes and he was already desperate to escape. 

The room was larger than he had expected it to be, and the walls were covered in glossy factual posters which he decided had to go the second he got the chance to take them all down. Setting his bag down on his desk, he heaved a sigh and scanned the room, there was more than enough space for thirty students, though he hoped that his qualifications would mean he only had to teach the older students in smaller group as he had never spent much time around children and he always struggled with tailoring his language to meet their level of understanding.

Since he was thinking about his interactions with children, his mind wandered over to the memories of the bullying he had endured at school and how cruel younger children could be. This was the first time he had allowed himself to worry about this since he decided to go into teaching, and he found his mind was beginning to spiral as he worried over what would happen should he be having a bad day for his speech or motor ability. He could only begin to imagine the teasing he would receive from students if he stumbled over his words or struggled to grip a pen properly.

A timid knock on the door of his classroom dragged his attention away from his spiralling thoughts, and he looked towards the sound.

“Hello, Dr Leopold Fitz is it? I’m Jemma. Jemma Simmons, head of the science department here. I specialise in teaching biology and chemistry. Do you prefer Leo or Leopold?” The woman at the door asked, in a rather cheery voice, far too cheery for a Monday morning.

“Just Fitz.” He replied quietly, looking at her and realising that he had probably just sounded very rude. Just because he didn’t intend to make friends didn’t mean he had to be awful to her. “Only my mum uses my first name, everyone else has always called me Fitz.” he says lamely in an attempt to offer an explanation.

She crossed the room to stand by his desk, holding her hand out for him to shake, which he did hesitantly. “It is interesting that you have a doctorate. I always intended to go back to do my PhD after a few years of teaching, but circumstances have prevented it unfortunately. Still, it’s very impressive that you have one.” She stopped herself, as if she caught herself rambling and wanted to get herself back on track. “What did you do your research on?” She asked with a smile.

“Oh, I, um, it was electronics. I mean, it was technically robotics, autonomous systems was my main focus.” He murmured, shifting uncomfortably in his seat, trying to avoid looking at her so that she would pick up on his discomfort and leave, but he wasn't off the hook just yet.

“So, Fitz, what made you go into secondary school teaching rather than going to teach at a university?” she asked curiously.

It was a valid question, he was well aware, but he hadn’t expected it from anyone so he didn’t have an answer prepared like he did for the majority of the generic questions he assumed that people would ask. “Erm, well, I…” he began, “It’s just that I, erm, I gu-guess that I’m not planning on this being permanent.” He said, feeling rather embarrassed. He looked down at the desk and cleared his throat awkwardly. “I’m just on a break from my old job for a while.”

“Ah, okay. Well maybe you’ll end up liking this more than your old job?” Jemma suggested with a little shrug. “Anyway, it’s good to have someone with your qualifications on the team. I do have to dash off to the heads of department meeting now, but if you need any help or anything, drop me an email or come to my classroom, I’m just next door.” She gave him a little wave and disappeared from the classroom.

He puffed out a frustrated sigh, letting his head sink into his hands. He had been hoping that everyone was awful and easy to hate, but he had spent less than two minutes with this woman and he could already tell she was completely lovely. He just had to promise himself that he wouldn’t get to know her too well.


	2. The Class Share

Although starting the new job had been difficult and he already hated all of his co-workers besides Jemma, but that was irrelevant, Fitz found that the new job had been good for him. It gave him a purpose and a routine – both were things he had craved when he had lived an unstructured life of solely focusing on recovery. 

He woke at seven o’clock every morning and would step into the shower bleary-eyed as he washed his hair, his face, and his body until he felt clean enough to climb out and wrap himself up in a towel. After his shower he got dressed having usually picked out his shirt and jumper the night before, and then went to have his breakfast before he drove to school, arriving early enough to give him time to review the information and lesson plans for the day. Having this routine made him feel organised and ready to face the rowdy teenagers that went to the school.

Armed with a travel mug full of black coffee and the large bag filled with the year seven and eight homework books he had taken home to mark over the weekend, Fitz made his way into the school building for his second week of work.

He took his time setting up, dividing the homework books up by year group and class number and stacking them in the corresponding boxes that he had set to the side of the classroom at the start of the year so that he could keep track of where the books were. By the time that he logged on to his computer he already had several emails, mostly generic staff-wide memos asking for volunteers for countless after school clubs, so he tended to just ignore those. 

There was one email, however, that caught his attention. It was from the head of science, Jemma Simmons, and it wasn’t a departmental email, it was direct to him. He sighed quietly as he clicked on to it, quickly scanning over the short message:

“Hello Fitz!  
Sorry to be a pain, but there has been a small issue with the timetabling for my year nine chemistry class. I know it’s not your area of expertise, but I was wondering how you would feel about splitting that class with me? There would be no extra work for you involved as I’ve already planned all the lessons out, so all you would have to do is read over the material and present it.  
If you’re interested, please come meet me at my classroom between 8:15 and 8:30 this morning as I have meetings throughout the day today and that’s the only time this morning I’ll be free to discuss it.  
Thank you,  
Jemma Simmons.”

“Ah, shite!” he muttered, glancing at the clock and seeing that it was already 8:29am. He practically leapt from his chair, bashing his knee on the desk closest to the door as he attempted to hurry out to her classroom. He caught her just as she was walking out of her classroom with a rather full binder clutched to her chest. 

“Sorry, I’ve only just seen your email. Uh, about the class sharing?” He said quickly, conscious that he might be making her late for a meeting.

Jemma smiled kindly at him, “Oh it’s okay. I do have to dash, though. I have a meeting with the head teacher in a minute and I don’t want to be late. I take it you’re interested in sharing the class?” She asked, closing the door to her classroom.

“I – uh – yeah, I think I’m interested. I mean, yes, it sounds interesting.” 

A challenge was exactly what he needed to take his mind off his recovery and teaching a subject that didn’t lie within his area of expertise sounded like the perfect one. It was enough to force his brain to work without being too stressful that it would make things worse. Jemma’s voice interrupted him from that train of thought.

“Right, well I really do have to go to my meeting, but if you’re available at lunchtime then just come over to my classroom and we can discuss how we’ll approach the class share. See you later!” 

He didn’t even have time to respond to her before she disappeared off down the corridor in the direction of the head teacher’s office, but he couldn’t help the small smile on his face as he went back to his own classroom to count the minutes until he could talk to Jemma about this new class he would be helping to teach – it surprised him how excited he was about it.

When lunchtime finally rolled around, Fitz moved to organise his classroom ready for his first class after the break since he didn’t know how long he was going to be talking to Jemma for. His excitement about taking on the challenge of a new class was beginning to give way to nerves, he was becoming rather worried that his lack of expertise in the subject would hurt the student’s learning in some way. Perhaps this was a bad idea. He could always offer to swap a class with someone who knew more about chemistry than he did.

Quickly becoming conscious that he had spent longer dwelling on his nerves than he had planned to, he grabbed a notepad and pen and headed off to meet Jemma, not wanting to keep her waiting any longer than he already had. She really seemed like a busy woman.

He knocked timidly on the door, opening when he thought he heard a muffled “come in!” from Jemma.

“Hi, are you busy?” he asked, giving her classroom a quick once over with his eyes, noting how she had plenty of what seemed to be posters she had made covering all the walls in the room and how organised everything felt. “Very tidy in here. Other classrooms look like a bomb went off in them.” He added in a quiet mutter.

“No, I’m free for a bit if you want to talk about sharing that class, and as for the state of my classroom compared to others, I was always taught at university that a tidy lab is a happy lab, I suppose I’ve just carried that on into my teaching.” She said, with a smile, gesturing towards the seat next to hers for him to sit down, and he sat down in it slowly. “So would you like to split the class with me?” She asked.

“Well are you sure you don’t want a chemistry teacher on this? It’s not exactly what I’m trained in.” He had to make an effort not to sound uncertain about himself.

“You’ve got a PHD, I’m sure you’ll be fine to teach yourself a little bit of year nine chemistry, even if you haven’t done chemistry yourself since before you were at university. Besides, no one is available” She said, glancing over at him with an almost teasing smile, but when he didn’t return the same expression, the smile slipped. “What was your PHD research on? I’ve been meaning to ask you but haven’t really had a chance to talk with you, I’ve just been so busy.”

“oh, well it was mostly focusing on practical applications of drones and the ways they could be adapted for law enforcement for things other than surveillance.” He explained quietly, tapping the table with his fingers. “I wanted to make a set of drones which could be used for forensics, but the sensors didn’t work the way I wanted them too, could’ve done with some help from the chemists but no one else could figure it out either.” He shrugged.

“Oh, I’ve done plenty of work with biological and chemical sensors, I’m rather good at coding them. It’s a shame I wasn’t around when you were working on those drones, maybe I could have helped. We could’ve been friends at university.” She half joked, peering over at him almost hopefully.

The word ‘friend’ set alarm bells ringing in Fitz’s mind, and he became incredibly anxious almost instantly. He didn’t wan to make friends, not anymore, so he tried to steer the conversation back to safer territory. “so this class sharing,” he said abruptly, “would it just involve me presenting and marking the work for the lessons that I teach or would you want me to do some planning too?” 

He tried to ignore the disappointed expression on her face at the sudden change of topic, and just listened to her reply, “No, don’t worry about planning, I’ll just send you all of the lesson plans and the specification points so you can read over them, and I’ll let you know which of the lessons you’ll be teaching.” She murmured as she looked down at the desk, pretending to busy herself with reading over some notes in a pad.

“Alright, well if you still want me to do it, I’m happy to, just let me know which periods I have to teach it.” He said, pushing his chair back to stand up, hurrying out of the room without looking back.

It took about twenty minutes for the emails with all of the information to drop into his inbox, and he opened them just to give everything a once over before he planned to read it in depth later that evening. Something caught his eye while he was reading through, though. She had sent over an altered timetable for the entire science department and he noticed that there was a chemistry teacher free at the time that Jemma had asked him to teach her chemistry class. He wasn’t sure why she wanted him teaching it over someone who was more experienced, but he had his theories. 

It seemed as though she wasn’t planning on making it easy for him to avoid her friendship.


End file.
